Way to Blue discusses tasteless terrorist mailer: we were in no way involved with this shameless PR stunt
Adam Rubins, CEO of communications agency Way To Blue, discusses how the agency has dropped its client following a mailer sent to journalists to promote A Belfast Story, which contained a balaclava, a bag of nails and a roll of gaffer tape.
PR companies get a bad rap. Sometimes it is deserved, often it isn't. As far as I am concerned, our role as a comms business is to help our clients positively reinforce their message and give consumers opportunity and choice.
Earlier this week, we saw the bad side of PR and its important that stupid errors like that don’t spoil it for the rest of us. Way To Blue have been working on the PR for A Belfast Story, a movie that explores life after terrorism, since April delivering offline and online PR support. Our partners Kaleidoscope are a trusted client and our aim with this campaign is to help the movie find an audience.
Usually, in circumstances like this, there are open channels of communication and the PR strategy is delivered and executed by the assigned agency with support from their client. This was not the case yesterday, when without our knowledge or the knowledge of our client, the film makers took it upon themselves to send certain influential journalists a mailer that included tasteless items related to the theme of terrorism.
Had we known about this, we would have immediately advised this to be an incorrect course of action and would have distanced ourselves from any such activity. We did not get that chance and the immediate and fair assumption was that we had played a part in this.
Our statement yesterday read; "We wanted to assure you all that press mailers for A Belfast Story have not been created, produced, or distributed by Way To Blue. We were very surprised to hear of the content via Twitter and do not in any way advocate these having been sent to anybody as a promotional tool. Our involvement on this project to date has been PR strategy and screenings and in light of this very misguided activity, we no longer feel we can be associated with this film and will no longer be working on the publicity campaign"
The first thing I want to make absolutely clear was that we were in no way involved with this shameless PR stunt and the moment we heard what happened, we acted immediately and decisively by removing ourselves from this campaign. At Way To Blue we pride ourselves on our integrity and honesty and there is nothing more important to us than relationships with our clients, journalists and customers.
PR is not a dirty word. It is something I am proud to do for a living and I couldn't be any prouder of the team we have and the way they respond to issues such as this. Our role is to provide a context and allow others to make a choice. Yesterday the context was cruelly mis-understood and the choice for some will now be an easy one to make. Not all publicity is good publicity, especially when its delivered by people that don’t understand its purpose.